by Alex Pugsley
I’d been leaning to one side to put Emlyn in line with the bullseye mirror on the far wall—I was not convinced she wasn’t supernatural and was confirming she produced a reflection—but at this mention of a boy in the house I nearly toppled from my chair.
Turning to see what I’d been looking at, Emlyn decided it was the silver framed photographs on the credenza. “Ah—” She put a hand on the closest photograph, a family portrait of a severe-looking couple presiding over an array of smock-dressed girls and sailor-suited boys. I identified Emlyn as the youngest, about four years old, her hair in ribbons and pin-curls, and holding in her hands a fluffy kitten. “My father,” said Emlyn, picking up the photograph. “He was a great man. Had the first motorcar in the city. Sent ships all over the world. Made the Deepwater Pier.” She passed me the photograph. “But he didn’t care for the Canadas. Wanted no part of the confederacy. At the Charlottetown Conference, why Poppa took a rifle and shot it up and down Richmond Street!”
Katie slipped off her chair and came to look at the photograph.
“And my brothers,” said Emlyn, musing. “They were brilliant. Merlin came first at Dalhousie. Walked away with every prize. And Howland, he was premier. My sister Ferelith, a great beauty.” Reaching for the glass of sherry at the empty place-setting, Emlyn’s fingers closed instead around a candle in the candelabra, knocking over the candle and sending a frightened Katie bolting under the table. The candle flamed a few moments before an indifferent Emlyn spilled some sherry on it. “But Edwin,” she said, staring at the smoldering wick. “My brother Edwin, Edwin was different. Edwin was a different sort.” Within her coiled pearls on a silver necklace was a gold wedding band. She touched at this and said, “Such a sweet fellow. And very kind. And so sweet for being kind. Do you know?”
I nodded, keen to agree, but I felt, from the way she was frowning at me, and the way she was blinking away the moisture from her eyes, there was a danger I might not understand this the way she wished. Her thoughts seemed to be circling after some contrary detail. Emlyn Mair was someone who wished to settle down with an understanding she’d properly worked out the meaning to something, a meaning she could then place in an appropriate pigeon-hole of her mind. But some detail wasn’t allowing her to settle down, some detail was flapping loose and delinquent, and her eyes flickered with disturbance.
“There was a portrait of the boy from the other yesterday.” She twisted to look at the credenza. “Where did—Good Christ.” She went silent. “If it isn’t the telephone again! They’ve gone too far this time. Why, I’ll sue. I’ll sue this city. If there’s one—”
“Are you looking for this?” Katie sprang up from under the table with a school photograph.
“Ha!” Emlyn snatched it. “I told you. Didn’t I tell you?” She pointed at Katie as if to demonstrate what true genius looked like. “Keep your eye on this one. She’s got a quality, this one here. I like the cut of her jib.”
Leaning out of my chair, I saw the photograph showed a beaming little blond boy in a white shirt and striped tie. “Hey,” I said, recognizing him. “That’s that kid—”
“You know my nephew, do you?”
“Cyrus Mair.” I studied the photograph. I’d met this kid. I’d known this kid. We had together one of the funnier afternoons of my life. And I’d forgotten him? I suppose Halifax was like that. Kids came and went. They were sent to school. They moved away. They disappeared into hospitals. But I felt ashamed that Cyrus Mair, a kid whose acquaintance promised events fantastical, I’d completely failed to remember.
“Now there’s a boy!” said Emlyn. “He’ll bring us back from the brink. You’ll see. Put this family back on the map.” She smiled, a fleeting spasm in her face, and helped herself to more sherry.
I looked again at the photograph—it suddenly seemed very important to me—and inspected it for clues. Penned on the back was his name, Cyrus Francis Mair in slanted cursive handwriting, and penciled beside his surname was an asterisk—that glyph again—which seemed to signal a run of related text, beginning with a smaller asterisk, along the bottom. Here printed in pencil in a child’s hand was the strange-looking phrase Cheltenham Prep Michaelmas but I was mostly struck by the recurrence of an asterisk and I was turning to include Katie in these spinky-related developments when I felt someone’s fingers firmly gripping my elbow.
“All right, Mr. Flimflam,” said Emlyn Mair, jingling with her other hand a small silver bell. She stared at me, her wig askew. “Would you like to really see something?”
~
I remember next the vast backyard—though I might be conflating visits—but I recall the wild weeds and brambles and rose bushes and certainly I remember, beneath the timber rafters of the garage, a flat-bottomed dory and old croquet box and—at the very back of the property—a Nova Scotian flag snapping at the top of a white-painted flagpole, colours flashing in the sun. I remember a gleeful Katie delving into a pit of discarded Christmas trees—decomposing, brown-needled, tinsel-ridden—and Emlyn jingling again her silver bell and the pigeons from the rooftops descending, dropping like shadows from the eaves and gables and chimney-tops. She lifted a dinner plate heaped with scalloped potatoes and slices of Parkerhouse rolls and slung these leftovers like slop into the dirt of the yard. Birds were loose in the air, flapping and trapped beneath each other, I remember a fright of squawks as two collided in front of Katie’s face. Few scenes in my early childhood could be said to be phantasmagorical—like I said, I didn’t get out much—but I’d like to submit to the judges Emlyn Mair Among the Pigeons for, when remembering this commotion, it seems a moment out of Nightmare, the flutter of wingbeats, the scatter and scramble of pecking birds. Emlyn watched these dramatics, amused. The more agitated the birds became, the more she enjoyed herself, making single snorts of laughter and waving erratically in the air, as if conducting some invisible symphony. “Have to be careful,” she said to Katie. “Can’t be too careful. One thing or another gets fouled up and you have the devil’s own time putting it right. But you see a sign. You see a sign. When it arrives, you’ll know.” She watched as two pigeons struck at the same slice of potato. “The grey one there. Look how sick he is!” This was a king pigeon, full of strut and bumble and favouring its right leg. “He’s had a turn. Won’t last long. Hopeless. Hasn’t got the stuff.” Emlyn visored a hand over her sunglasses. “But look at that one. With the fickle spot. He’s a little fighter. Look at him go!” Something had changed in her relations with us, she was playful and defiant, and whatever detail she’d been searching for, she’d found it now. “Life takes a lot of twists. The world’s a harum-scarum place. But when one reaches a turning point, it’s best to know which way to go. I really think so, don’t you?” Turning to me, she made a charming smile—a smile radiantly certain—and I realized she was sharing this with us not as an adult with two random kids but as an individual with two likeminded spirits, and I realized, further, that, in some way, in some Emlyn Mair way, she cared about us.
~
Why would someone spend their entire life remembering a dead brother? Was it crazy? Was it noble? Over the years, my mother would field a number of drunken phone calls from Emlyn Mair—for whom my father would do some legal work—and considered her crazy. “When I think of all the times that woman called your father drunk and complaining about her bill. This strange, strange old woman, she’s had this horrible life and withdrawn from the world, but at the same time you don’t want her to end badly, you know? You’re sort of sympathetic.”
It was understandable, my father said, that the woman might be thought a little eccentric but he didn’t think her quite crazy.
“A little eccentric?” said my mother. “The woman’s an absolute fruitcake. She hasn’t come out of the house, Stewart, she hasn’t seen the light of day, for God’s sake, in fifty-five years. You call that eccentric? Puh. Who knows with that family? They don’t need a reason that makes sense to anybody else. A
nd to think a child’s living there with all those jeezly fucking birds. I suppose she’s drunk half the time anyway so what does she care? Honest to God, Emlyn Mair, that family, they’ve got a lot of junk in the attic. A lot of ghosts.”
The woman was grievous strange, you had a sense her contradictions obsessed her, but there seemed to me a bravery to Emlyn Mair. She was pursuing in her mind an entirely different set of specifics and persisting in her imagination was a vision of her family as a sort of dynasty, as tycoons in some grand capital. I would be fascinated by the Titus Mairs, this once-splendid family, and fascinated with Emlyn Mair, a figure who seemed to have emerged out of an early daguerreotype. And I mention all this because, to put these scenes on my storyline, the Mairs would become my enchanted kingdom—I would dream my life in their vicinity—and my general admiration for their exploits, my mooning over their failures, and my marveling at their perpetuities, would pervade my youth and childhood. For this afternoon marked the day I began to understand that what you choose to believe in—a set of flying horses, a long-dead brother, the mysteries of a family—can determine what you yourself become.
~
Six o’clock on Tower Road and within the clouds the sun brightens, sending watercolours through the rainy sky—deep reds opalescing to scarlet and pinkish blues to sudden violet. Waiting for me in the wind of the sidewalk, Katie holds a third Orange Crush. She takes a sip and asks, “Is that cat still alive?”
“Which cat?”
“In the picture.”
“Probably not. That’s before wars and everything when pictures were in black-and-white.”
“So I wasn’t even born yet?”
“Me neither.”
Katie takes another sip, her teeth stained faintly orange. “And who was the other table-place for?”
“Her brother? I don’t know.”
“But is he dead?”
“I guess so.”
“And the kid in the school picture, you know him?”
“Once I did. He came to Bonnie’s birthday party.”
“That lady,” says Katie, flicking some hair off her forehead. “She made a deal. With the ghost.”
“Who said that—Boba?”
“No.” Katie puckers her lower lip, fretful. “Boba’s gone.”
“Where’d he go?”
“Well,” she says, taking my hand. “He got the glotch!” She is in the middle of a fluid peal of giggles—and pulling me down the sidewalk—when she squeezes my fingers. “Aubrey!” She stoops to grab something in a puddle. “An Easter egg?” Her voice rises to a playful shriek. “And it’s alive!” Making a dimply smile, she holds in her hand a pigeon egg, pale blue, about the width of a quarter. “Can I keep this? Because this is so—this is so—this is so beautiful.”
“Yeah, probably.”
“Yes!” Katie runs triumphant down the sidewalk, the pigeon egg held to her heart. As I watch my sister dash away, in the air between us glides a dandelion seed head, fluffy in all directions. I touch at this drifting spore, watching it soften against my finger, and it seems to me a three-dimensional asterisk. But whether it’s a footnote to a moment that’s gone before—or if it indicates a run of meaning still to come—I don’t know, but I do understand, finally, shivering, and watching it float above my head, that there is magic in the world, if only I might let myself see it.
Crisis on Earth-X
I was four years old when Uncle Lorne came to live with us. He was my mother’s younger brother by twenty-two winters, a mistake of uncertain paternity according to my sisters, and he joined our household when his own was in freefall. “Nanny and Dompa are drunk all the time is why,” explained my sister Bonnie. “That’s why he’s like that.” Nanny and Dompa, living in Montreal, were moving into some marital hurly-burly during this time, so it was decided, mostly by my father, that twelve-year-old Uncle Lorne would benefit from the relatively steadier environment of our house in Halifax. I was eager to have such company for in my house I was surrounded by women—my significant mother as well as two sisters above and two below.
Uncle Lorne was a singular and decidedly non-feminine addition to our house. He arrived with hobbies fully formed, with habits and rules and secret disciplines. He made models of Iroquois helicopters, completed abstract jigsaw puzzles, and, in an amazing display of homemade engineering, constructed a lunar docking station for our Major Matt Mason action figures from the parts of a rotary phone, a discarded bicycle tube, and a Fram oil filter. He showed me how to draw propellers and Gatling guns and Batman’s cowl—an image I am still known to improvise on unopened letters from Revenue Canada. Uncle Lorne owned more than a thousand comic books which he kept in boxes under his bed. Each purchase was thoughtfully registered by title and number and condition on blue graph paper inside a mauve Duo-Tang folder. Though he followed many comics, he was closing in on complete runs of The Justice League of America and The Brave and the Bold, back issues of which he acquired from a mail-order concern in Passaic, New Jersey. This endeavour, among others, was funded by delivering The Mail-Star, the city’s afternoon broadsheet. Uncle Lorne had a route of one hundred and sixty-three newspapers, an ambitious amalgam of three existing smaller routes, and on Wednesdays—when the paper swelled with advertising flyers from Sobeys and the IGA (“Two-for-one 1-2-3 Jell-O!” “Try new Beef Noodle Hamburger Helper!”)—I was pressed into service as sidekick and all-purpose lackey. The dropped-off newspapers came in bales held together by blue twine. In winter, they were fearsome cuboid chunks of frozen newsprint. But the day I’m remembering is not winter. The day I’m remembering is one day away from true summer, a Wednesday in late June, one of the longest of the year. I am now ten, Uncle Lorne eighteen, and the city is strangely warm, daylight endless, a dragonfly soft-lifting on an ocean breeze. We are far afield. From the Wellington Street drop-off we have ranged to The Nova Scotian Hotel, back through the Dalhousie University campus, and are now tramping westerly on Jubilee Road. We are covering another boy’s paper route—Chris Cody, one of Uncle Lorne’s intimates—and this adds fifty-two papers to our travels. But even four hours into our overland explorations, I don’t mind. This afternoon alone I’ve been shown a live seal in the Life Sciences aquatic tank at the university. I’ve been taught a new climbing technique called “chimneying.” And here at the bottom of Jubilee Road I see the street literally sinks beneath the sea, the Northwest Arm flooding up the slope of a concrete boat ramp, the setting sun a thousand times refracted in its waves. Though I can hear my uncle calling for me above, I take a moment to imagine Aquaman underwater beyond this boat ramp, spinning away from the shallows to some murky sub-stratum of the North Atlantic, perhaps rising buoyant through sun-filtered depths, bursting to the surface to rendezvous with the Batboat, the two superheroes racing toward a far horizon. A few weeks before, I read a Justice League two-parter about a supervillain zombie called Solomon Grundy, a story that featured in a heroic role the grown-up Robin of Earth-Two, and in my mind I decide to place this fully formed Robin in the Batboat. I admire his blended costume, his motorcycle, and how he has assumed the mantle of crime-fighting when the Batman of his world began to dodder—because, to be honest, recently I’ve been wondering if events might force me in a similar direction. Solomon Grundy required a team-up between the Justice League of Earth-One and the Justice Society of Earth-Two, and the series has become my favourite team-up story ever. I keenly anticipate the next interworld issues, numbers 107 and 108, copies of which have been ordered from New Jersey for both Uncle Lorne and me. My copies will be considered paid in full if I do eight more Wednesdays on the paper route.
Uncle Lorne calls for me again and this time I straggle up Jubilee Road where he is smoking a cigarette. He allows himself one cigarette after the papers have been delivered. He puts out the cigarette on an old and furrowed telephone pole, leaving the filter inside a vertical crack, and exhales, his chin bobbing in time to some percussion heard
in his head. Uncle Lorne has many internal rhythms whose patterns will remain somewhat mysterious to me, just as he seems someone whose personality may remain fundamentally unknowable. “Kink-man,” he says, using a family nickname. “Ready to race?” A Note of Personal History: as many of you will remember, the last few years for me have been spent on crutches, in a wheelchair, or fretfully limping, and it’s only now, at the age of ten, that I am recovering motion and strength in my left hip. Naturally this conflicts with my desire to be the World’s Greatest Athlete because my limp and shortened left leg lend my walk a crooked, hop-along quality—an extraneous feature, I like to imagine, that disappears in the madness of an open sprint. Although I still find it tiring to sustain longer efforts, Uncle Lorne has devised a system whereby the distance run is increased each Wednesday by twenty sidewalk squares. We started close, South Street and Tower Road in March, and are now advanced to Robie and Jubilee. I am given a head start of fifty resting heartbeats—Uncle Lorne holding two fingers to his throat to count his pulses—then he will charge after me.
Taking off my shirt and tying the sleeves around my waist, as I’ve seen some older boys do on the Dalhousie campus, I say I’m ready. Uncle Lorne inspects the winter pallor of my stomach. “Whew,” he says. “Fish belly! Fish belly on the old grub.” He speaks as if this is a joke already established between us. “Fish Belly Grub. Grub-a-dub-dub. Race with the Grub.” It is one of his recreations to explore the associations of words—which he sometimes pronounces in confusing and menacing variations. But I take his meaning as only teasing, tighten my laces, and crash off, propelling myself down the sidewalk beside the Camp Hill cemetery. I take the corner on South Street at top speed, losing my balance and dispersing my wild centripetal motion by straying into the street itself. As I speed past the Killam Hospital, I hear a commotion somewhere behind me—a rush of sound that is my uncle closing the gap between us. Slinging myself around a stop sign for extra momentum, I meet Tower Road with out-of-control, berserker ferocity. I know, like the grown-up Robin of Earth-Two, that there are do-or-die moments when you simply have to prove yourself. Seeing our house, and sensing a win for the first time, I flash a giddy look behind me—only to allow Uncle Lorne, on the other side, to spring up the steps of the front porch and, as he always does, touch the door latch, signaling the end of our contest and his victory. I protest if only I hadn’t looked over my shoulder, losing precious split-seconds, this time I could’ve won, would’ve won, should’ve won. Uncle Lorne bobs his head again, noncommittal, and mentions that he thinks I ran my best race so far. He pulls open our front door and pauses in the evening air. I am just noticing a viral spread of pimples on his chin when he says, quietly, “Run your own race, Grub. Run your own race.” With that semi-cryptic koan, he vanishes inside to his basement bedroom, and I limp happily into the kitchen.